Tuesday Evening Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Aditya Chakrabortty comments on the stunning turnaround experienced by the UK city of Preston after it started making a concerted effort to use public money to benefit citizens and local development.

- Meanwhile, CNN Wires notes that in contrast, massize Amazon warehouses don't do anything to add to net employment. The Hamilton Spectator laments the fact that Ontario's government has decided to hand Loblaws an effective monopoly on transit cards. And Landon Thomas Jr. writes about the World Bank's new role pushing P3s as an added means of extracting wealth from countries which are already short on resources of their own.

- Amina Zafar reports on some cuts to Canadian generic prescription drug prices arising out of an agreement not to pursue a tendering process for a few years. But Vik Adhopia notes that we'll still end up paying far more than in New Zealand among other jurisdictions where tendering processes are actually used - meaning that there's still every reason to push for a more fair deal for the public.

- Tom Parkin discusses the need for stronger protection against sexual harassment beyond what the Libs have introduced so far. And Nathan Heller points out that precarious and gig workers are particularly vulnerable.

- Finally, the Globe and Mail questions the Libs' decision to shield incumbents from any accountability in their ridings.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Oxfam studies the spread of extreme inequality around the globe, as well as the policies needed to combat it:

Oxfam’s decades of experience in the world’s poorest communities have taught us that poverty and inequality are not inevitable or accidental, but the result of deliberate policy choices. Inequality can be reversed. The world needs concerted action to build a fairer economic and political system that values everyone. The rules and systems that have led to today’s inequality explosion must change. Urgent action is needed to level the playing field by implementing policies that redistribute money and power from wealthy elites to the majority.
...
Despite the fact that market fundamentalism played a strong role in causing the recent global economic crisis, it remains the dominant ideological world view and continues to drive inequality. It has been central to the conditions imposed on indebted European countries, forcing them to deregulate, privatize and cut their welfare provision for the poorest, while reducing taxes on the rich. There will be no cure for inequality while countries are forced to swallow this medicine.
...
Elites, in rich and poor countries alike, use their heightened political influence to curry government favours – including tax exemptions, sweetheart contracts, land concessions and subsidies – while blocking policies that strengthen the rights of the many...This undermines investment in sectors, such as education, healthcare and small-scale agriculture, which can play a vital role in reducing inequality and poverty.

The massive lobbying power of rich corporations to bend the rules in their favour has increased the concentration of power and money in the hands of the few.

- Meanwhile, Jeremy Runnalls points out that North Dakota is ensuring some real public benefit from resource exploitation by using increased royalty income on both a public wealth fund, and investments in renewable energy.

- Joe Friesen reports that despite the Cons' bluster about reining in abuse of the temporary foreign worker program, they've continued to allow an increase in the number of low-skilled positions filled with workers treated as disposable. And Bill Curry notes that the Cons' latest dodge is to base enforcement on provincial employment laws - meaning that as long as understaffed provincial enforcement agencies can't expose wrongdoing, employers will be able to keep abusing their workers with the federal government's approval.

- Sara Mojtehedzadeh discusses what universal child care means for working women. And Martin Regg Cohn slams the Cons for instead pushing an income splitting scheme which is unfair both to the families who actually need better access to child care, and to provinces who have tied themselves to the federal tax system.

- Finally, Alice Funke examines the nomination process now playing out within Canada's federal parties, and finds that a fixed election date seems to have resulted in a large number of contested nominations.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Linda McQuaig criticizes the Cons' use of the tax system to try to silence charities who don't match their political message:

PEN now joins Amnesty International, the David Suzuki Foundation, Canada Without Poverty, the United Church and other groups that, having criticized an array of Harper policies, have been obliged to devote precious resources to defending themselves from a special probe of charities ordered by the Harper government.

This beefing-up of tax audits of charities is particularly striking when compared to Harper’s laid-back approach to auditing the real bad guys: corporations and citizens using offshore tax havens to cheat the government out of billions of dollars in revenue.

Indeed, the allocation of an extra $13 million to carry out audits of charities has taken place even as the government slashes the overall Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) budget by $250 million over three years and lays off hundreds of auditors.
...
Internal CRA documents, obtained under access-to-information by Sen. Percy Downe, reveal that an infusion of $30 million by Ottawa in 2005 to counter “aggressive international tax planning” resulted in the collection of an extra $2.5 billion over four years.

By contrast, putting extra resources into auditing charities will almost certainly produce no additional revenue.
...
(W)hile there aren’t enough auditors to go after many of the wealthy Canadian corporations and individuals hiding money offshore, the government managed to find two auditors to spend three days this week at PEN’s little Toronto office — the beginning of an audit that will go on for many months.

The Harperites may be inept at using audits to collect vast sums of revenue hidden by the rich — but they sure know how to beat up on defenceless groups trying to promote the public good.

- And Dean Beeby breaks the news that the Cons aren't satisfied going after charitable organizations, and instead want to be able to compile their own list of individual donors as well. But there is some push for disclosure where it's actually needed as a check on undue institutional influence, as MoveOn is calling for corporate spending in U.S. politics to be subject to public scrutiny.

- Bill Curry reports on the C.D. Howe Institute's recommendation that the federal government focus on economic development rather than deficit scolding - with Joe Oliver naturally responding that he has no interest in job creation if it might conflict with his political goals. And Rick Goldman comments on the futility of using austerity policies in the name of fighting deficits when they ultimately cause more harm than good even by that measure.

- Steven Chase discusses the latest application of the Baird Doctrine that bluster matters more than action in foreign policy - as a much-trumpeted aid announcement for the Ukraine four months ago has led to zero actual contribution from Canada.

- Finally, David Atkins connects the U.S.' drift to the right with participation in party primaries - as the Tea Party and other right-wing groups have driven Republican turnout (and thus policy oriented toward its base) while Democrats have been increasingly staying on the sidelines over the past 40 years:

When conservatives don't get what they want, they tend to double down at the ballot box. When progressives don't get what they want, many of us tend to storm away and fantasize about engaging the system outside of electoral politics somehow. This is part of why conservatives have been successful in moving the country to right.

I've brought these points up again and again. Politicians don't care about people who don't vote, and the Tea Party gets coddled because they actually vote in primaries and Democrats tend not to.

But, of course, Democratic politicians also bear a lot of the blame. It's awfully hard to get motivated to vote when you know that not much is going to change regardless of the outcome.

Even so, you can't lay the entire blame for the problem at the feet of centrist corporate Democrats. The trend toward lower turnout started in 1970, hardly the heyday of the DLC. Yes, Democratic politicians need to do a better job of advancing progressive priorities and building base enthusiasm. But progressive voters also need to come out and actually vote, too.

New column day

Here, contrasting the NDP's hard-fought Regina nomination elections against the stories of Paul Manly, Chris Rendell, and the apparent trend of federal and provincial NDP candidates being disqualified from seeking nominations for entirely insufficient reasons.

For further reading...
- The Leader-Post reported on the nomination victories by Erin Weir in Regina-Lewvan and Nial Kuyek in Regina-Qu'Appelle here. And for a couple of examples of Weir in particular making important points which don't entirely match the NDP's party line both provincially and federally, see his challenge to the cult of small business and his disclaimer-laden Commonwealth commentary on resource royalties and employment in Saskatchewan.
- Manly told his story here, while his past comments seeking the safe return of his father and challenging the NDP to do more in the effort are available here and here. [Update: And there's some response from party officials in Susana Mas' report, though the question of whether the NDP has rejected some candidates in the past on stronger grounds has little to do with whether it was justified in doing so with Manly.]
- Finally, CBC reports on Rendell's rejection alongside the recruitment of Bev Harrison here.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Crawford Kilian discusses the growing influence of Thomas Piketty's observations about wealth inequality and the unfairness of a system which inherently perpetuates privilege:

What I take away is this: We are playing in a rigged game. The deck has always been stacked against us, and against our parents and grandparents, world without end. Why? Return on investment has always been higher than economic growth, and you can live well on just a fraction of that return while saving the rest for your offspring to inherit. They in turn will build the family wealth still more, Piketty explains. This is patrimonial capitalism, and it has nothing to do with education, skill or hard work -- only with whose legs you happen to have been born between.

For the bottom half of the population, he writes, "The very notions of wealth and capital are relatively abstract. For millions of people, 'wealth' amounts to little more than a few weeks' wages in a checking account or low-interest savings account, a car, and a few pieces of furniture. The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence."
...
Piketty sees a possible alternative: a worldwide universal, progressive tax regime. It would have to be worldwide to prevent the megarich from squirrelling their money away in the Cayman Islands or some other tax haven. (He suspects a lot more has already been hidden than anyone realizes.) This taxation wouldn't impoverish the one per cent, but it would give governments a better sense of just how rich everyone is -- and isn't. He suggests such a tax regime could begin regionally and eventually spread worldwide.

But that's just one economist's opinion. The rest of us, finally armed with Piketty's data, need to start debating what to do about the rich and the poor. We don't want a war to equalize matters, and revolutions tend to end badly.

But we need to make the one per cent understand that every dollar, pound and euro they make ultimately comes from the elaborate infrastructure the rest of us have created. They only exploit it. They are not the job creators; we are the wealth creators. They have no more right to a free lunch than we do, and high incomes warrant high taxes.

- Meanwhile, Tavia Grant reports on the OECD's finding that Canada is seeing income inequality spread even more quickly than other developed countries. Which means that there's a particularly obvious need for a policy response at home, while working out our options within the international community to address the global concentration of wealth and the abuse of tax havens.

- But of course, the Cons are more interested in exploring ever more exploitative practices to be inflicted on workers in Canada - such as the indentured servitude of temporary foreign workers examined by Andrew Stevens. And so Robyn Benson is right to note that there's reason for younger workers to worry about their future (while hopefully taking action to change it for the better):

Employer demands for a two-tier wage system is a fact of life in the present economy, condemning younger workers to a permanent low-wage existence. And abuses in the Temporary Foreign Workers program make even McJobs far less available to them. The Harper government’s expressions of shock when the abuses at come to light doesn’t hide the fact that it issued the permits in the first place—or that 75% of all new jobs over the past few years have gone to imported temporary workers.

Overall, workers in the 15-24 age group are facing high levels of unemployment, and employment prospects are getting worse. Despite popular accusations of “entitlement,” many young people have taken years to train for careers, and have the degrees to prove it, but now find themselves in low-skilled jobs because better work simply isn’t available.

It’s no surprise that many of these bright millennials are turning to unionization as a solution to the low-wage trap they have found themselves in. This is “bottom-up” pressure that is bound to pay dividends now and in the future for the workers who engage in it, and for society as a whole. Higher rates of unionization mean better, more secure employment, and the possibility of facing the future with confidence.

What is also badly needed in Canada, however—and what the new generation of workers isn’t getting from the present government—is a national jobs strategy that actually creates opportunities for young people to put their training, skills and intelligence to good use, in productive careers. Everyone would benefit from that, no matter what generation they are. But our youth, it seems, have a long way to go before that Spring arrives.

- PressProgress exposes Kinder Morgan's stunning argument that its pipeline expansion should be allowed in part because of the benefits of oil spills in creating cleanup work. Charles Pierce discusses the environmental devastation caused by unfettered tar sands development. And Mychaylo Prystupa takes a look behind one of the most prominent B.C. astroturf groups pushing for handouts to the resource sector at the expense of the environment and the rest of the population.

- Finally, Alice Funke offers a useful primer as to the nomination processes in Canada's federal political parties.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Andrew Coyne sees the powerful impact of local forces on nomination contests as evidence that grassroots democracy is still alive and well in Canada - no matter how much the Cons and Libs may wish otherwise:

What’s common to both of these stories is not only the willingness of local candidates and riding associations to defy the powers that be but their obstinate insistence that these races should be what party leaders claim they are: open nominations. With any luck, this obstreperousness will spread. Thanks to redistricting, there will be other ridings where incumbents face off against incumbents; in others, the promise of open nominations will run into the reality that leaders have favourites. Ridings that resist the inevitable attempts to stage-manage these races will do their parties a favour. Tilted nominations are not open nominations. They’re not even nominations, really.

The tendency, when these fights break out, is to view them as signs of weakness and division, if not anarchy. The tone of news coverage is often disapproving, as if party leaders were indulgent parents who neglected to discipline their children. Reporters pepper their stories with words like “messy,” “ugly,” even “vicious.” This is what you get, they seem to say, when you leave it to ridings to decide these matters. Yes, it is. Isn’t it glorious?

- But of course, we should be hoping for greater democratic participation (and yes, influence over results) within the broader electorate as well. And PressProgress notes that the Cons' Unfair Elections Act looks to benefit Pierre Poutine and his fraudster ilk at the expense of actual voters - while Alison points out the risk that any report on Robocon may be pushed past the next federal election due to the Cons' blindside attacks against Elections Canada.

- Thomas Walkom writes that Canada has received good value - if perhaps something less than the greatest possible return - from the long-term health care accord which the Cons chose to scrap.

- John Geddes highlights the stark gap between the Cons' lip service paid to climate change (based mostly on taking credit for the actions of others), and their utter negligence in reality. And the Edmonton Journal's editorial board makes it clear that even Alberta recognizes the need for real action to replace the current strategy of using misleading PR campaigns to greenwash dirty oil production.

- Finally, Christina Patterson writes that the economic forces which have already undermined wages at the bottom of the income scale may soon do similar damage to the middle class.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Matt Taibbi discusses how public pension funds are being looted for the benefit of a few well-connected banksters:

Hedge funds have good reason to want to keep their fees hidden: They're insanely expensive. The typical fee structure for private hedge-fund management is a formula called "two and twenty," meaning the hedge fund collects a two percent fee just for showing up, then gets 20 percent of any profits it earns with your money. Some hedge funds also charge a mysterious third fee, called "fund expenses," that can run as high as half a percent – Loeb's Third Point, for instance, charged Rhode Island just more than half a percent for "fund expenses" last year, or about $350,000. Hedge funds will also pass on their trading costs to their clients, a huge additional line item that can come to an extra percent or more and is seldom disclosed. There are even fees states pay for withdrawing from certain hedge funds.

In public finance, hedge funds will sometimes give slight discounts, but the numbers are still enormous. In Rhode Island, over the course of 20 years, Siedle projects that the state will pay $2.1 billion in fees to hedge funds, private-equity funds and venture-capital funds. Why is that number interesting? Because it very nearly matches the savings the state will be taking from workers by freezing their Cost of Living Adjustments – $2.3 billion over 20 years.

"That's some 'reform,'" says Siedle.

"They pretty much took the COLA and gave it to a bunch of billionaires," hisses Day, Providence's retired firefighter union chief.

- The Star's editorial board weighs in on the lack of job opportunities for young workers.

- CBC reports on Alberta's order that a lake be drained in an attempt to contain an ongoing bitumen spill. But of course, it would make more sense to identify and mitigate the risk of that kind of disaster before it materializes - even as the Cons have taken steps to make sure that their oil-industry benefactors don't have to bother carrying out any environmental assessment before putting our land and water at risk.

- Which is to say that the tar sands represent possibly the most important example of a lack of upstream thinking in our current governments. But the new Upstream think tank is working on questioning the short-sighted thinking that leads to harmful (and avoidable) consequences in the long run.

- Finally, Peter Loewen discusses why nomination elections are so valuable within our democratic process:

Hard data on contested versus uncontested nominations are hard to come by, but some do exist. In a recent academic article, Royce Koop and Amanda Bittner document the trend of appointments. In each election from 1993 to 2008, approximately five per cent of Liberal candidates were appointed. This may seem a modest number, but the cumulative effect is a cause for concern. By 2008, a fifth of Liberal MPs were originally appointed candidates. Most have never contested a nomination.

Appointed candidates and those who win nomination battles have different careers. Those who enter politics via a secure candidacy are more likely to find themselves taking up cabinet positions and other high-profile sinecures. They eschew the lower-profile tasks of representation and constituency work.
...Insisting on open local nominations requires candidates to do two things. First, to establish that they are willing to solicit the support of local party members, just as they will have to soon request the support of all local voters. Second, to demonstrate that they can.

Noah Evanchuk to Seek Palliser NDP Nomination

One of the main questions coming out of the Saskatchewan NDP leadership campaign was how much of the movement behind Ryan Meili and Yens Pedersen would keep up its momentum once the leadership race was over. And there's some good news to report on that front: Noah Evanchuk, one of Meili's key Regina organizers, is planning to seek the NDP's nomination in the Palliser riding.

I'm not aware of a date being set for a nomination contest, and it could be that others will also come forward to contest a seat where Don Mitchell and Jo-Anne Dusel both put up strong second-place finishes in the last two elections following Dick Proctor's painfully close loss in 2004. But all indications are that Evanchuk is looking to build on Meili's model to take back Palliser for the federal party - and based on the structure that's already in place, there's plenty of reason to like his chances.

(Edit: Fixed typo.)